Agile development aims at providing ample flexibility to accommodate continuous changes in the product development cycle. Continuous changes require continuous testing of inherent functions and coding standards to ensure that products are released faster, at the same time upholding the highest standards for quality.

Why Code Analysis?

To cope with the increasing customer demand, in terms of features and functionalities, there is also a need to accelerate time to market. Considering this demand of customers to continuously development of new software product functionalities, every aspect of the software needs to evolve, including the coding methods.

The continuous changes in the source codes and coding methods invite vulnerabilities and risks of defects. This is why code analysis becomes important for any software development cycle to avoid possible failures in the product. Moreover, with agile development, ensuring code quality and security becomes an integral part of software development cycle, making it mandatory to perform code analysis tests.

Types of Code Analysis

Source code analysis can be both static and dynamic and is much needed to promote quality of the code in a product development project.

Static Code Analysis:

Static code analysis is about analyzing the source code without executing the actual program to find potential vulnerabilities, bugs and security threats. Static code analysis tools identify the patterns in the code and detect possible security threats and issues in the quality of the code. This will help in revealing any issues in the early stages of development, which can be rectified during the development stage, allowing developers to develop a strong code base.

The developers can also automate the code analysis, which will eventually develop the culture of creating quality code. Automating the code analysis saves time and helps identify issues that may not be detected otherwise. There are various tools which will help you to automate or semi-automate your code analysis process and most of these tools are free, which any developer or tester can utilize with ease.

Dynamic Code Analysis:

Contrary to static code analysis, under dynamic code analysis, the code is executed and then the analysis is done based on how it behaves. However, it is important that both static and dynamic code analysis be performed on the software during the development process. While static code analysis can detect most of the security issues that can be faced, dynamic code analysis gives some added benefits in finding security issues that could be faced while interacting with other components.

The dynamic code analysis process consists of various steps, which include, preparing input data, running a test program, and analyzing the output data. All these steps are performed based on the set parameters the product is supposed to perform. It creates its own code patterns based on the original code to test the following functions or steps.

How Does Code Analysis Benefit in Agile Product Development?

Code analysis has a great impact on the software product development process and yields greater benefits to the software product in the end. Here’s how:

• Automates certain test processes to save time and manual efforts by defining project related rules for the test process.
• Helps in identifying errors in the code at an early stage, which allows fixing issues as and when they arise or as and when they are detected. Mostly code analysis tools are free, which reduce the total cost to fix them by 60%.
• Improves the quality of the source code and security, as security data leaks have been reported more often. It can identify vulnerabilities in runtime as well, depending upon which type of code analysis your testing team implements. It also improves the coding standards among developers.
• Ensures faster time to market that enables companies to not only test the code faster, but at the same time release that product into the market to cope with the market demand.
• Enables seamless integrations with the different phases of the software development life cycle, allowing companies around the world to increasingly adopt Agile environments for faster releases.

Implementing code analysis not only improves the overall product quality standards, but also pushes your developers to adopt best coding practices. This allows building a strong culture of developing the best products that will serve its purpose efficiently.

eInfochips has expertise in utilizing Agile and DevOps methodologies for continuous testing of products, ensuring each product meets the quality expectations of the end users. Know more about our expertise in QA and test automation.